I find David Frum’s Cato Unbound essay on the GOP and small government a bit puzzling. Frum writes:

The state is growing again–and it is pre-programmed to carry on growing. Health spending will rise, pension spending will rise, and taxes will rise.

Now I still continue to hope that the Republican Party will lean against these trends. But there’s a big difference between being the party of less government and a party of small government. It’s one thing to try to slow down opponents as they try to enact their vision of society into law. It’s a very different thing to have a vision of one’s own.

And the day in which we could look to the GOP to have an affirmative small-government vision of its own has I think definitively passed.

Frum seems to lament that passing in his essay, and regularly indicates through use of first-person that he’s on the side of minimal government types in this debate.

But is that really the case?

I think one big reason why the politicians on the right have given up the small-government vision is because the ideas people on the right — the scholars, pundits, and commentators — have given them intellectual cover. Those bold 1994 visions of axing the Depts. of Commerce and Education have given way to figuring out how to expand those departments to advance big government conservatism. Witness David Brooks, the right’s most prominent pundit, on the vaunted New York Times op-ed pages:

But gradually and fitfully, Bush has muddled his way toward something important, a positive use of government that is neither big government liberalism nor antigovernment libertarianism. He’s been willing to spend heaps of federal dollars, but he wants that spending to go to programs that enhance individual initiative and personal responsibility.

[...]

Like Franklin Roosevelt in the New Deal era, Bush doesn’t have a complete vision of what he wants to achieve. But he does have an instinctive framework.

His administration is going to fight a two-front war, against big government liberals and small government conservatives, but if he can devote himself to executing his policies, the Gulf Coast will be his T.V.A., the program that serves as a model for what can be done nationwide.

When prominent conservatives speak wistfully of the New Deal, it’s tough for them to dismiss the GOP’s slide toward big government as regretful but inevitable. They’ve helped grease the skids.

Part of this I think is because conservative intellectuals have painted themselves into a corner with their fervor for adventurous foreign policy. It’s hardly surprising that the same people who fervently believe the U.S. government is capable of (in fact, morally obligated to) remapping the entire Arab world, and of building liberal societies from little more than sand and religious fanatacism, would lose sight of their skepticism for domestic government programs. The two aren’t compatible. Over and over, history shows that when government gets aggressive overseas, it gets aggressive at home.

Reihan Salam and Ross Douthat also contribute an essay to the Cato Unbound discussion — appropriately, I think, because they’re a great example of what I’m talking about. Salam and Douthat are rising stars in the conservative commentariat, but not because they’re effective advocates for limited government. On the contrary, their widely-discussed “Sam’s Club” vision for a GOP domestic agenda not only doesn’t call for reductions in the size of government, it assumes them away, beginning with the presumption that government will continue to grow — so conservatives may as well take steps to grow it in the right direction.

But let’s get back to David Frum. Consider the following, written by Frum himself:

I know it will make our friends at the Cato Institute choke, but with a new study suggesting that more than one-fourth of the rise in health costs can be attributed to obesity, would somebody explain slowly to me why a federal tax of say a penny an ounce on calorific sodas would not be a good idea?

[...]

And as Americans struggle with an epidemic of obesity and the ensuing costs to the taxpayer conservatives who favor (as almost all conservatives do favor) Medicare and Medicaid need to ask themselves whether their easy libertarian attitude to the worst practices of the fast food industry retains its relevance. Big Gulp drinks and super-sized fries are making America sick and you are paying the bill. A little moderation would cure a lot of medical and fiscal ills; and a little incentive might induce that moderation.

Note that Frum not only accepts the legitimacy of Medicare and Medicaid, he’s not even begrudging about it. In fact, he takes favor for the massive entitlement programs as a starting point…for conservatives. From there, he moves on to how we should save the two programs from obesity, which he blames on big business and too much liberty. And his remedy for all of this is….more taxes.

I challenge anyone to find an ounce of “limited government vision” anywhere in that mess of a policy proposal.

The main reason I find this “we tried, but it’s a losing battle, so if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em” approach disingenuous is because it ignores one big reason conservatives once gave for opposing liberal government programs in the first place. Conservatives never opposed welfare because they hated poor people, or Medicare because they hated old people. They opposed these programs because they recognized that they don’t work — that the collected wisdom of the market combined with a caring civil society is a better way to address these problems than the professed benovolent wisdom of a few self-proclaimed “experts” empowered to impose their will on everyone else.

Now that they’re in power, much of the right seems to have lost that distrust of central planning. Apparently, the problem wasn’t the actual planning so much as the fact that the planners were leftists. Now, it’s okay to appoint a few experts to impose heavy-handed policies and regualtions on the rest of the country, so long as said experts are sufficiently conservative, and espouse policies appropriately deferential to God, family, restraint, earnestness, tradition, and whatever other remaining values conservatives still claim as defininitive of their philosophy.

Another testament to the corrupting influence of power, I guess. In this case, it’s corrupted not only the individuals wielding it, but damn-near an entire political philosophy wielding it.

Incidentally, I did some rudimentary research, and found that nearly all the assumptions Frum made to justify his support for a fat tax were wrong, despite his dismissive, “I know better” tone. Yet another reason why it’s best to let people make lifestyle choices for themselves, instead of letting the ruling elites choose for them.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 11th, 2006 at 11:52 am by Radley Balko and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.